Food Web Connections Game

Today we played a card game that models food webs and the connections between organisms. Each student was dealt a hand of organism cards. The goal was to build a food web with 5 levels, from decomposers, to producers, to primary, secondary, and tertiary consumers. They drew from a pile of cards to add to their web and mixed in were cards that forced them to do different things, some of them beneficial and others that were not. For example they may get to take a producer from someone else's web or they may have to give away a consumer. If at any point, they lost all of their producers, then their food web would collapse and they would have to start all over. At the end of the game they mapped their food webs and discussed how well the game modeled real situations. We discussed the advantages and disadvantages of using different types of models to understand how things work in the real world. Homework is due tomorrow and there will be a short quiz on Friday.